


Special Responsibility

by Catharrington



Series: Harringrove Week of Love 2020 [2]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Harringrove Week of Love 2020, M/M, Magic AU, Post Season 2, abuse of magic, attempted brain washing, poor billy is just trying to have a chill party, steve is an addams family member i suppose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-05
Updated: 2020-03-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:20:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23021602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catharrington/pseuds/Catharrington
Summary: Magic wasn’t for the weak of heart. Steve learned that the hard way after his heart was shattered by one Ice Princess. But even with a broken heart and a desire to never practice his mother’s old spells again, Steve still found himself jumping at the call to protect someone. Especially if that someone is Billy Hargrove.
Relationships: Billy Hargrove & Steve Harrington, Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington
Series: Harringrove Week of Love 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1654594
Comments: 3
Kudos: 50
Collections: Harringrove Week of Love





	Special Responsibility

**Author's Note:**

> this is day 2 prompt magic au for hwol. These were originally on my tumblr before i created this account. All are stand alone plots and do not have to be read in any order or together even.  
> thank thank thank you so much for reading!!!! :)

Steve had balled up and thrown away all his occult things years ago. All the candles and dried flowers, chalk and bleached bones, mushrooms, crystals, even his book that his mother gifted to him first day of high school.

Her long fingers rested over its dark bound cover like a birds claws around a tree branch. “Are you sure, Steven?” She asked without disappointment in her voice and somehow that hurt worse.

“It’s just not…,” Steve wanted to say his cup of tea but that was immature. More than anything he wanted to be mature, and wise and powerful but in time he realized he didn’t need his mother’s blessings or spells for that. “I am sure.” He steadied his eyes with her and for a moment her slim fingers looked like the claws of a demogorgon but only for a moment.

She simply nodded. And walked away.

Now Steve was walking alone down a gravel covered drive way to a Halloween party he didn’t want to attend. But Nancy had just gotten off the phone with him and the collar tight on his neck still pulled for her.

“I didn’t know who else to call. Who else to ask?” Her words turned up like a question in a cute way. She quickly explained that she went to the party for the live band, Jonathan was a big fan, but something didn’t seem right. The air was static charged. She felt in her bones the same way she felt that day in the woods she accidentally crawled into another dimension. 

Cold. 

“I didn’t know who else.” She repeated again. “I’m sure Chief Hopper would just shut the whole place down. And the kids? What? There’s alcohol!” She scoffed at Steve’s question.

“Sorry I asked,” Steve dragged his words and his hand over his face. Then he agreed to be there as quick as he could.

At the end of the road there was a barn holding up against the will of nature. It’s red wood melted to one side asymmetrically and it’s roof was missing on the other side. That hole allowed the glowing lights of the party to dance across the sky. They flickered and Steve’s grip on his bat tightened in his hand.

Nancy and Jonathan were standing outside They were wearing matching lab coats and bright blue face masks pulled down to their gaunt collar bones. Steve could laugh at the idea of them in matching surgeon costumes but he held it in. “Doctor,” he greeted cheekily.

“Steve,” Nancy was happy to see him. “We have another problem.”

The two surgeons rattled on about all the quirky things that happened at the party. Steve wasn’t fully listening as he held his bat hard against his shoulder. But the last part about a certain Billy Hargrove made his ears perk up. 

Nancy explained how he was on stage playing the drums actually decent, part of the band, I know I was surprised too, then he just wasn’t. Only Nancy would notice something that small. But Billy Hargrove was never one to let his presence be small. Jonathan explained that he tried to go into the back to look around but it was locked up tight. Very suspicious.

Steve did agree it was strange, but it wasn’t otherworldly. Nancy pulled his collar again.

“I felt it.” Her words were cryptic but serious. “The same quietness, the same gross feeling. It was like it was just beyond that door.” Her thin fingers worked hard at the material of plastic gloves being wrung out in her hands.

It went unspoken. The upside down.

“And you want me to what? Knock down the door?” Steve watched them. Their joint yes also went unspoken.

Inside the party was loud, painfully so. Steve kept his bat pulled tight to his side as he snaked behind Nancy and Jonathan. The door was in the far corner to the left of the stage. Before Steve even got to it he could feel the energy pulsing from its heavy metal frame. 

This wasn’t the same upside down energy, however, this was far more familiar. This was a black ink staining everything it touched. This was candle smoke heavy in the air rolling out from under the door like a wet bog. Steve thought he had given all this up. 

“I’m going in alone.” He demanded before he even considered the words in his head.

Nancy was aghast, “No!” But she didn’t last long under Steve’s half lidded eyes.

He walked up and pressed his hand against the cold metal door. It was locked, but that didn’t mean much to him. With a little prayer they didn’t notice, Steve casually lifted his finger and the heavy latch unlocked on the other side of the door. He pushed it open easy then closed it softly behind him, blocking out Nancy’s endless questions.

A narrow hallway lead into darkness. Steve held forward his bat as he followed it all the way down to a cellar. The walls were still mud, freshly dug, and the music of the party was still loud. But from center of the cellar steady moaning hung like a lure on the water. 

Steve’s eyes adjusted to the soft light of a few candles burning in a circle around a blackened spot. Steve didn’t need his eyes to completely adjust before he realized what he was walking into.

“This isn’t happening.” Was all he could gasp.

In the middle of the cellar was a painted white circle interwoven with spirals and intricate ruins. Candles dotted along each ruin, black as the inky darkness, and burning red hot. Inside the circle stood a locked cage and inside the locked cage stood a man. Steve felt his breath catch in his throat as he found Billy Hargrove.

Another needy groan ripped the cold air and caused Steve’s cock to give a kick. Billy was standing up and holding the bars of the cage with both hands, his forehead pressed between them, those golden curls darkened from being dripping wet. Steve noticed he was once wearing a shirt and now it was rags torn around the belt at his jeans. Cuts and lettering criss-crossed his tanned glistening skin, Steve didn’t need to come closer to know what they were. But he stepped closer.

Steve walked cautiously into the drawn circle. Billy gave another long moan as if he could feel the other getting close. Lifting his open hand to the cage bars, Steve felt the energy coming off in tendrils, thick and wet, like the lines of drool going down Billy’s chin to his chest. 

That mess of blonde hair lifted and Steve had to stop a gasp as he saw once bright blue eyes turned a ghostly white. Teeth opened from a heinous snarl and they were a matching holographic glow. Steve let his fingers press against Billy’s wet cheek, and trace softy to his wet lips where pressing into the skin returned him a growl. Billy turned slightly to try and bite his finger but was much too weak.

“What are you doing here, Harrington?” A voice rang out in the darkness, but Steve already knew he wasn’t alone.

Two cold pairs of eyes stepped out of the shadows to glare into Steve. A boy and a girl and they held a heavy bound book between them. “Thought you out grew us, Harrington.”

His family name was a mockery on their lips.

“Let him go, please.” he said simply. Steve kept his palm on Billy’s cheek.

The boy laughed from the darkness. “Right when the fun was staring? No. This is our night. This is what we can take.”

Steve shook his long hair. “You can’t take this.”

“Why! Why do you get to tell us what we can do!” It was the girls turn to speak. Her voice was shrill and other worldly. “You left us to rot for your fucking Princess Nancy! You can’t lead us anymore!” She swallowed hard and shook out her head of tight curls. “Enslavement is the word I summon!”

Steve turned his head sharply. He saw the two right outside the candles with lights illuminating their cowardice. Tommy and Carol wanted to kill Steve, and sure they had a right to try, but they had no right to touch Billy.

Billy who was quickly loosing a battle of wills inside a metal cage.

Billy who’s mane of California curls was limp from sweat.

Billy who looked right at Steve but couldn’t see him.

Billy who moaned for Steve but couldn’t speak to him.

Billy who had done a lot of shit and talked more shit but didn’t deserve this shit.

Steve didn’t think as he moved his palm from Billy’s cheek to the heavy lock on the cage door. He pressed against it and the metal gave way obediently. Billy let go of the bars and fell hard to his knees. 

Steve wore a sharp glare as he spoke. “This ain’t right and you two assholes know it. Magic isn’t a game.” He pulled his eyes from the positively burning pair to Billy’s snarling face. He had become like a wolf, crouched low, his fingers dug into the mud and his teeth were still glowing. Rabid almost, he struck out and bit at where he imagined Steve’s hand was. So Steve knelt down softly and hovered his hand above Billy’s carved up chest as he started.

His mother’s written words fell out of his mouth easily, like he hadn’t gone years without practice. A foreign langue once not foreign at all that held so much power. Especially powerful from the tongue of a Harrington. Carol was almost screeching from the distance and he heard the telling slam of a book into the dust.

Steve could remember his mothers voice as she gave him his book first day freshman year. “With our name and power comes a responsibility. How you balance it. How you use it. All up to you. But know everything comes back around in a circle. Magic has a reaction, Steven. We who use it have this special responsibility.”

And that’s why Steve threw away his magic. He had seen the darkest side of it, the cruelest side. A white haired man who stole little girls from their mothers and ripped monsters from the walls. Steve knew the physical way a failure of that responsibility would manifest into a creature with elongated arms and a mouth for a face who hunted the blood of teenagers for food. From that day he had thrown away his magic and swore to protect those who couldn’t protect themselves.

Billy was looking right up into Steve’s eyes now. One of his hands had wrapped around Steve’s thigh, pulling heavy on the fabric, and ripping it.

Then, as quick as a blink, the blue in Billy’s eyes was back. He looked around wide eyed and without understanding. Confusion looked really good on him, Steve thought fondly.

“Hear me,” Steve’s voice was low and casual as he spoke. “What is done cannot be undone. With my power I lay claim. Protection is the word I summon. Protection.”

Billy shook the cobwebs from his head. He was never one to take long to recover, but he allowed himself the small weakness of using Steve’s arms to brace himself as they stood. 

There inside the circle of black candles Steve held his new responsibility in his arms. 

Only for a moment, however, before he stepped away and demanded answers to where he was. What was happening to him. “Pretty boy?” He leered in a reassuringly familiar way. “You rip my shirt off?”

Steve just rolled his eyes and looked away. Thankfully the room was dark and the designs carved into his skin were already disappearing. “Yeah,” he responded. Pointing down to his thigh where the denim was ripped back and bloody. “Just a little pay back.”

They didn’t notice how Tommy and Carol ran from the room or how the noise of the party seemed to dissolve. Steve lifted his bat again and shrugged as Billy’s eyebrows shot up to his hairline.

Outside Nancy and Jonathan we’re sitting on the hood of his car. The party was cleared out by an electrical failure and even though Nancy swore it was the upside down, and what was going on behind that metal door, they had to flee with the crowd and wait like good teenagers in safety. 

She lifted her head from her hands as Steve casually emerged followed by a shirtless Billy. Standing to run to them she wasn’t as quick as the glare on Billy’s face, or the way he turned and walked away from Steve before she even got close. 

Stopping by Steve, Jonathan in tow, she was filled to the brim with questions. Just boiling out her ears with what she wanted to investigate. But Steve just waved her off. Silly, gross party games he explained shortly. You wouldn’t be interested. He held his former status over her head like a cat reaching for a feather on a string, then he kept walking. Not in the direction of his parked car. But in the direction of a steel blue Camaro roaring to life. 

Nancy noticed but she kept her mouth and fists tightly clenched. Questions for another time.


End file.
